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Bowing at the Altar of Damon

Some thoughts on Fenway Park and the 3-1 Red Sox win we saw.

1) Itâ€™s wonderful when something youâ€™ve heard about all your life fully lives up to its billing. Fenway did. Itâ€™s a nearly perfect ballpark. Really, pharmacy thereâ€™s not a lot I could say about Fenway thatâ€™s not already been said elsewhere. Everything youâ€™ve heard is true. Itâ€™s cozy enough that even from our seats 13 rows up in dead center, unhealthy we felt close to the action. The long rows and tight spaces discourage the sort of incessant milling around that the crowds at, say, Wrigley Field are prone to. And while the high walls and blocky upper deck block any view of the neighborhood, that means that once youâ€™re in Fenway, everything is centered around the game. The ballpark maintains an enclosed, insular feeling such that even the drunk fans gave the impression of being at least somewhat attentive, and most fans were concentrating on every pitch. It was a wonderful place to see a ballgame.

2) The current ownership of the Red Sox, having decided that, rather than attempt to extort a replacement for Fenway from the city like the previous owners attempted to do, they would take advantage of having one of the best ballparks in baseball while still taking every chance they could to squeeze more money out of it. To that end, theyâ€™ve made some changes that I suppose might bother longtime Sox fans, but that I thought were actually pretty good. They added seats to the top of the Green Monster. They added some seats to the roof of the upper deck. They added (I think) another section of upper deck just past the end of the grandstand in right. And, to me the most surprising: they seem to have talked the city into letting them more or less take over Yawkey Way on game day. Turnstiles are set up in the middle of the street, and once youâ€™re past them, youâ€™re in the park. Towards the back of the outfield grandstands, it appears that theyâ€™ve actually moved the exterior walls of the park out onto what would have been the sidewalk, allowing the Sox to open up what had formerly been a cramped concourse under the stands. Theyâ€™ve used the space to make navigating the park easier and to put up more of the things the contemporary fan is said to want: food stands, urinals, and more food stands. Itâ€™s a successful alteration, one that I think I wouldnâ€™t even have noticed had I not been there on a non-game-day tour in 1993.

3) If I didnâ€™t know that Paul Harvey is a Midwesterner, I would have thought he was working as the Red Sox public address announcer last night. The announcer had Harveyâ€™s voice, inflections, tone, and cadences. Jim and I both expected him to end his announcements with â€œGood day.â€ Regardless, he was without a doubt the best PA announcer weâ€™ve heard on the trip. Late in the game, with the crowd absolutely ecstatic singing along to â€œSweet Carolineâ€ between innings, he began to announce a pitching change for the Tigers. Noticing that the crowd was still shouting â€œBump-ba-dah,â€ he paused, let the last notes of the song pass, and completed his announcement.

4) The guys behind us, four early twenty-somethings down from New York for their first Fenway game, were the sort of drunkies who tend to bug me a lot at Wrigley, in part because theyâ€™re always up and down and milling around. But these guys just didnâ€™t bug me that much. They were loud, but a lot of their talk was about the game, and much of the time, when it was off-topic, it was fairly entertaining. Like when one guy was talking about Emeril, and another guy had never heard of Emeril, and the first guy spent ten minutes explaining who Emeril is, complete with a lot of: â€œYou know–Bam! Bam! That guy–Bam!â€

5) I do have one suggestion for PA operators at stadiums nationwide: just because a band records a song about your team/ballpark, you shouldnâ€™t play it unless it also doesnâ€™t suck. The only dissonant note in the whole night was the four minutes, pre-game, we had to spend listening to a terrible country (Country? In New England? Why?) song called â€œHaving a Ball at Fenway.â€ It sucked more than the Blue Jays song; the only reason it wasnâ€™t worse overall was that it wasnâ€™t like spreading throw-up all over the seventh-inning stretch with a butter knife the way the Blue Jays song was.

That song aside, though, the organist and PA people were solid. The organist began the game with â€œSelections from Jimâ€™s iPod,â€ which began with â€œWalk Away Reneeâ€ and went on to “Eight Days a Weekâ€ and â€œAfter the Gold Rush,â€ among others. Later, I–who usually am not excited all that much by stadium crowd singalongs–got a big kick out of hearing the crowd sing along to â€œSummer Wind,â€ then go absolutely brains-melting crazy over â€œSweet Caroline.â€ Itâ€™s as big as â€œHey Ya!â€

It was odd for me to see Red Sox fans–who generally appear to be some of the most attentive fans in baseball–doing the wave and bouncing beach balls.

6) Everyone knows that the Red Sox are Yankee-obsessed. But Jesus, people. â€œYankees suck!â€ chants cropped up without provocation, and anti-Yankee t-shirts were selling nearly as well as Johnny Damon shirts. Itâ€™s like the slacker kid in high school constantly writing mean things about the cool kids in his notebook. Sure, Iâ€™ve got sympathy, but at the end of the day, he keeps doing it, and heâ€™s just using up space in his notebook he could be using to transcribe Violent Femmes lyrics.

7) The Red Sox scoreboard advertises a new service: if a fan feels his enjoyment of the game is being hindered by, say, drunk and rowdy fans nearby, he can, rather than wait for an usher to show up, call the security hotline on his phone. Not that Iâ€™m a fan of using the phone at games, but given that Wrigley Field ushers never seem to be around when drunks begin chucking peanuts at everyone in sight, I could imagine being able to phone security might be helpful. The trick would be avoiding getting a beer dumped on your head while you phoned.

8) And Johnny Damon got a couple of hits, stole a base, scored a run, made a couple of catches. And the Mike Timlin made another great appearance out of the Sox bullpen. And the Sox won, running me and Jim to 6-0 on the trip.